🌊 Calming

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

A cat purr you tune by size, mood and breathing rate, for people who work better with a notional cat on the desk.

Daily nonograms in every size from five squares to fifty, with a timer and no attempt whatsoever at decoration.

Guided meditation for people who have never meditated, starting at two minutes and never once mentioning chakras.

Human-curated and listener-supported, mixed like an album rather than a playlist, at an absurdly high bitrate if you want it.

Half an hour of rain and distant thunder on a loop, running since before background noise was a productivity category.

The first Samorost, free in the browser, a wordless point-and-click about a small gnome diverting a planet off a collision course.

Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.

Live HD cameras on piazzas, beaches and ski slopes across Europe and beyond, which is the closest a browser tab gets to a day trip.

An endless procedurally generated drive through mountains and deserts, with no traffic, no timer and nothing to hit.

The National Zoo's cameras on lions, elephants and naked mole rats, publicly funded and refreshingly free of any advertising.

Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.

An endless sheet of virtual bubble wrap that pops under the cursor and quietly refills itself behind you.

Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.

Daily solitaire challenges dealt from guaranteed-winnable shuffles, with a leaderboard for people who want the streak.

Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.

Grid sequencer with a marimba and a drum kit, tuned so that anything you tap sounds passable, then shared as a link.

The planetarium in a browser tab — set your location and it shows exactly what is above you right now.

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.

Timeline readings that describe periods rather than days, phrased as amateur psychology rather than fortune telling.

Type anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.

Pour coloured sand into layered dunes with the mouse, which is considerably more absorbing than it has any right to be.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs and they come back far smaller with no visible difference. Nothing else to learn.

A quick whiteboard in the browser: sketch boxes, arrows and doodles, share a link and draw together in real time without making an account.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

Click to place a block and a small algorithm builds a plausible seaside town around it, with no goal of any kind.

Drops you into a field recording from a forest somewhere on earth, tells you which forest, then offers you another.

Same idea as typing but with notes rather than drums — write a paragraph, receive a surprisingly pretty melody.

Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

City walking videos, driving tours and a guess-the-city game built on top of them, sorted by country for when you cannot travel.

Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.

Live webcams sorted by country and theme, from Alpine passes to Caribbean beach bars, with a great many pointed at completely empty roads.

Live safari drives broadcast twice a day from South African reserves, with guides answering viewer questions over the radio as they go.

Ten minutes out of somebody else's window somewhere in the world, filmed by them and left quietly running.

Crazy golf on a floating landscape that unfolds into a new course between shots. Worth playing for the transitions alone.

Over a hundred solitaire variants with proper undo, statistics and card backs from 2007. Still the most complete one going.

Recordings of very nearly every bird call on earth, uploaded by amateurs and searchable by species, country and even call type.

One expanding circle to breathe along with, adjustable to box breathing or 4-7-8, and nothing else on the page.

Old Faithful on a live feed, plus static cameras on the geyser basin and the north entrance, run by the National Park Service.

The Norwegian met office's forecast, famously accurate across Scandinavia and unusually calm about admitting uncertainty everywhere else.